Improving fast_align by Reordering

Abstract

fast align is a simple, fast, and efficient approach for word alignment based on the IBM model 2. fast align performs well for language pairs with relatively similar word orders; however, it does not perform well for language pairs with drastically different word orders. We propose a segmenting-reversing reordering process to solve this problem by alternately applying fast align and reordering source sentences during training. Experimental results with JapaneseEnglish translation demonstrate that the proposed approach improves the performance of fast align significantly without the loss of efficiency. Experiments using other languages are also reported.